W.G. Grace: the game's first superstar
A practising doctor with a beard everyone recognised, W.G. Grace was already the biggest name in cricket for over a decade before he played his first Test. When Test cricket finally reached England in 1880, he marked the occasion with the first century ever scored on English soil.
A doctor first
William Gilbert Grace trained and qualified as a physician, and practised medicine in Bristol for much of his playing career, fitting his cricket around a working medical practice in a way that would be unthinkable for an international player today. He was already playing first-class cricket as a teenager in the 1860s, for Gloucestershire and for England representative sides well before Test cricket existed as a formal concept, and by the time the first official Test matches were played in the late 1870s, Grace was already, by a wide margin, the most famous cricketer in the world.
Famous before Test cricket existed
Grace's fame rested on more than a decade of extraordinary first-class scoring before his first Test. He is widely credited with changing how batting itself was approached, playing both forward and back with equal comfort and control at a time when most batters of note specialised heavily in one method or the other, and his enormous appetite for runs in county and representative cricket through the 1860s and 1870s drew crowds on a scale the game had not previously seen. By the time he walked out for his first official Test, he was already in his early thirties and a household name across England.
That first-class career ran on almost in parallel with his Test appearances for the rest of his life, and it is the scale of it, widely reported to have reached tens of thousands of runs and thousands of wickets across more than four decades of first-class cricket, that historians point to when explaining why his reputation sits apart from the comparatively modest Test figures below. Test cricket, in his day, was simply a small and irregular part of a much longer, much larger career spent almost entirely in England.
The Oval, 1880
That first Test came in September 1880, at the Kennington Oval, the first Test match ever played on English soil. Grace marked the occasion with 152, the first century scored in a Test match in England, in an innings that also included his brother, E.M. Grace, and set the tone for the growing status of Tests played at home. England won the match, and Grace's innings became, in effect, the first great English Test performance to be witnessed by a home crowd, a fitting way for the game's biggest name to open his Test career.
The Oval again, 1886
Grace returned to his best form at the same ground six years later, having already built a reputation across those intervening seasons as the most consistent scorer in English cricket regardless of the bowling he faced. In 1886, at 38 years old, he made 170 against Australia at the Oval, the highest score of his Test career and, at the time, one of the largest innings played in a Test in England. It sits alongside 152 from that first Oval Test, 75 at Lord's in 1890, 68 at the Oval in 1893 and 66 at Lord's in 1896 among his five best innings in the CricArcade archive, a spread that shows a batter still scoring heavily against Australia into his late forties, an extraordinary span for any era of the game.
Captain and all-rounder
Grace captained England in 13 of his 22 Tests in the archive, winning 8 and losing 3, at a time when the England captaincy had no formal selection process and typically fell to the senior amateur available for a given match. He was also a useful bowler, taking 9 wickets at 26.22 across his Test career with a roundarm action that had been effective enough in his younger first-class years to make him a genuine all-rounder, even if by the time Test cricket arrived his bowling had become a secondary part of his game behind the batting that had made his name.
The face of the game
Grace played his last Test in 1899, against Australia at Trent Bridge, by which point he was over 50 years old, the oldest man to have played Test cricket at the time, and had spent nearly four decades as the dominant figure in English cricket. Stories of his fierce competitive streak on the field, disputes with umpires and opponents that have been retold and embellished for well over a century, are part of cricket folklore, though the precise details of many of them are impossible to verify at this distance. What is not in question is the scale of his fame: photographed, caricatured and discussed more than any other sportsman of Victorian England, Grace is generally regarded as the first cricketer, and one of the first sportsmen in any code, to become a genuine national celebrity.
The numbers
The CricArcade archive, built from Grace's 22 Test scorecards, records 36 innings, 1,098 runs at 32.29, with 2 hundreds and 5 fifties, figures that look modest next to later Test greats largely because his career was so heavily weighted towards the years before regular Test cricket existed. Every one of his Tests was against Australia, the only opponent England played in his era, and the Kennington Oval was comfortably his best ground, 8 Tests for 504 runs at 45.82, including both his highest scores. His 1880s figures, 542 runs at 36.13 from 11 Tests, edge out his 1890s return of 556 runs at 29.26 from a further 11 Tests, a career split almost exactly down the middle. England won 13 of the 22 Tests Grace played, lost 5 and drew 4, a strong return for a side he led or anchored through the earliest years of regular Test cricket between the two countries.
Sources
- CricArcade player page: full career record, best innings and scorecard links
- ESPNcricinfo: W.G. Grace player profile and Test career statistics
- Wisden Cricketers' Almanack: obituaries and tribute pieces on W.G. Grace
- Wikipedia: W. G. Grace